Author: Ingrid Lunden

TECHCRUNCH When we wrote about gaming startup Kahoot passing significant milestones of 70 million users on 51 million educational quizzes in January, we mentioned that the Oslo, Norway-based startup was closing another round of funding. Now, that has come to pass: Kahoot has announced that it has raised $17 million, at a valuation that sources close to the company confirm to us is $100 million. The funding comes after a change in leadership and strategic direction for the company: its American CEO Erik Harrell has stepped away from the role while remaining on the board of the company, and has...

TECHCRUNCH The first big tech IPO of the year has opened with a bang. Zscaler, a security startup that confidentially filed for an IPO last year, started trading this morning as ZS on Nasdaq at a price of $27.50/share. This was a pop of 71.9 percent on its opening price of $16, and speaks to a bullish moment for security startups and potentially public listings for tech companies in general. That could bode well for Dropbox, Spotify and others that are planning or considering public listings in the coming weeks and months. We’ll continue to monitor the price as...

TECHCRUNCH A significant changing of the guard is underway in the world of telecoms and tech out of Asia. CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong conglomerate that owns the European mobile carrier 3 among other mobile and tech holdings, has announced that Li Ka-Shing is stepping down as the company’s chairman and executive director, after 46 years at the helm and 68 years since founding Cheung Kong (CK), effective May 10. Li is Hong Kong’s richest man, and he also controls Horizons Ventures, one of the bigger and more influential VC firms not just in Asia but globally. He will be succeeded by Li Tzar Kuoi, known as Victor Li, who is his son and the brother of Richard Li. We have contacted Horizons to ask how and if the firm or Li Ka-Shing’s involvement is impacted as well and will update this post as we learn more. Li, pictured here, stepping down marks the end of an era of Hutchison building up a conglomerate that includes shipping and port services, energy, retail and more alongside telecoms. The departure was announced alongside the company’s earnings, where the company reported revenues of 414,837 million Hong Kong dollars ($52.8 billion) and profits of HK$35,100 ($4.5 billion) for the fiscal year. The company has some 123.1 million subscribers to its mobile services across various markets in Asia and Europe. “Looking back at the past...

TECHCRUNCH Over the last several years, social media has become a critical and central way for businesses to communicate, and market to, their customers. Now, one of the startups that help spearhead this trend has raised a round of growth funding to expand its horizons. Hootsuite, the Vacouver-based social media management company that counts some 16 million businesses as customers, said today that it has raised $50 million in growth capital — specifically through a credit financing agreement — from CIBC Innovation Banking. We asked Ryan Holmes, the co-founder and CEO, for details about its valuation and funding, and...

TECHCRUNCH While credit-scoring behemoth Equifax continues to work through the fallout from its massive security breach, one of its big competitors is snapping up a startup in the UK to diversify its business. Experian today announced that it is acquiring ClearScore, which has built a platform that — like Experian — offers you a credit score, which it then uses it to suggest financial products like credit cards that fit the bill, so to speak. Experian is acquiring ClearScore for £275 million ($385 million), plus an unspecified earnout based on future performance. The deal is expected to close later...

TECHCRUNCH Blue Vision Labs, an augmented reality startup co-founded by computer vision experts from Oxford and Imperial College, is emerging from stealth today with a new platform that it claims will be the first to bring ‘collaboration’ to the AR experience: with an app built on Blue Vision’s technology, multiple users will be able to see the same virtual objects, and interact with each other in that virtual space. Applications where this kind of feature could come in useful could include multi-player games, on-street navigation apps, social media applications and education. Peter Ondruska, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, tells me...

TECHCRUNCH An interesting development in Europe over how WhatsApp and Facebook will work together, which is also a victory of sorts for data protection and privacy advocates in the region. Today, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced that it has closed an investigation into whether WhatsApp and its owner Facebook could legally share user data with each other; and one significant upshot of it is that the ICO has gotten WhatsApp to sign an undertaking in which it has committed publicly not to share personal data with Facebook until the two services can do it in a way that...

TECHCRUNCH As the world’s largest search engine and a digital advertising behemoth, Google has a lot to answer for when it comes to misleading or false information being spread using its platforms, both through ads and through content that is monetised by way of those ads. More recently, the company has been on a mission to try to set this aright by taking down more of the bad stuff — be it malware-laden sites, get-rich-quick schemes, offensive content, or fake news — and today it’s publishing the latest of its annual “bad ads” reports to chart that progress. Overall, it appears that Google has been nabbing more violating content than ever before — a result, it says, of new detection techniques and a wider set of guidelines over what is permissible and what is not. “Wider” is the key word here: Google added 28 new policies for advertisers and a further 20 for publishers in 2017 to try to get a better grip on what’s whizzing around its services. Here are some of the big numbers out of the report: In 2017, Google removed 3.2 billion ads that violated its policies around harmful, misleading and offensive content — nearly twice as many as it did in 2016 when it removed 1.7 billion ads. Google also blocked 320,000 publishers from its ad network (more than three times the 100,000 sites it...